Centuries ago, Abbey Town was one of the most important places in the North of England. It is a crossroads village and stands on the Solway Plain, almost midway between Wigton and Silloth, in the parish of Holm Cultram.
The village formerly a market town, is a hotch-potch of homes with its main claim to fame being the church of St Mary, known as Holm Cultram Abbey. The Abbey was built in the 12th century originally as a Cistercian monastery, and enjoyed great power for many centuries, even entertaining Edward I on two occasions, until the Dissolution in the reign of Henry VIII. It is actually one of the few monasteries to survive as a parish church, though only a small portion of the original building remains. The church itself is made from what was at one time the nave of the Abbey. Within a century of the Dissolution, Abbey Town had regretfully proved itself unworthy of the great church left in its care, and by the 17th century it was already a ruin. The 18th century saved what could be saved, the 19th century restored it, and the great Tudor porch is now a little museum of old things rescued. The museum itself has one of the finest pieces of Norman architecture in Cumbria, the magnificent west doorway, with its five moulded arches and its eight pillars with carved capitals. It is 16 feet high and stands in a wall eight feet thick.
To be seen also is a relatively modern inscription to the man who was the last Abbot, and then the first Rector, and another to Joseph Mann, who on his farm hereabouts did a great service to farmers when he invented the first crude reaping machine, one of the primitive fore-runners of the first reaper invented by Cyrus McCormick a year or two later.
In the graveyard will be found the tombstone of the father of Robert the Bruce who was buried here in 1294 (25 years in fact before Robert himself sacked the Abbey).
Many of the buildings associated with the monastery are still inhabited today, one of them being Mill Grove dating from 1664, which originally was the infirmary... along with cottages belonging to the Abbey which have been transformed into a library and offices. At one time the village had no less than five public houses, but nowadays this is reduced to one, along with a post office, and two additional shops. The oldest business in the village is the blacksmiths which has been trading as the original smithy since 1925.
Amateur archaeologists will no doubt discover the moated mound (probably a burg) just north of the church. Also nearby is the Raby Cote Farm, the sixteenth century seat of the Chambers family.
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